Why, then, let them alone till they are sober: if they make you not then the better answer, you may say, they are not the men you took them for.

Dogberry, scene iii

In this definition is contained the answer to the question as to what gives men the power to establish laws. What gives them the power to establish laws is the same thing which secures obedience to them - organized violence .

To me this question whether liberty is a good or a bad thing appears as irrational as the question whether fire is a good or a bad thing. It is both good and bad according to time, place, and circumstance, and a complete answer to the question, In what cases is liberty good and in what cases is it bad? would involve not merely a universal history of mankind, but a complete solution of the problems which such a history would offer.

For me there are no answers, only questions, and I am grateful that the questions go on and on. I don't look for an answer, because I don't think there is one. I'm very glad to be the bearer of a question.

I am a believer in liberty . That is my religion to give to every other human being every right that I claim for myself, and I grant to every other human being, not the right because it is his right but instead of granting I declare that it is his right, to attack every doctrine that I maintain, to answer every argument that I may urge in other words, he must have absolute freedom of speech.

Robert G. Ingersoll, in an appeal to the jury in the trial of C.B. Reynolds for blasphemy (May 1887).

The Internet has made me very casual with a level of omniscience that was unthinkable a decade ago. I now wonder if God gets bored knowing the answer to everything.

Douglas Coupland, "Transience Is Now Permanence & the Fate of the Middle Classes (Doomed)", in The Edge Annual Question—2010: How Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?[1], January 2010

“Where there is mind, there is always solution,” Keneenk taught. All problems contained the elements of their answer.

Religion, of course, assured him that the answer to his query was, in various books, explicitly written, in very dissimilar forms. But Kennaston could find little to attract him in any theory of the universe based upon direct revelations from heaven. Conceding that divinity had actually stated so-and-so, from Sinai or Delphi or Mecca, and had been reported without miscomprehension or error, there was no particular reason for presuming that divinity had spoken veraciously: and, indeed all a available analogues went to show that nothing in nature dealt with its inferiors candidly.

My theory of technique, if I have one, is very far from original; nor is it complicated. I can express it in fifteen words, by quoting The Eternal Question And Immortal answer of burlesk, viz. "Would you hit a woman with a child? No, I'd hit her with a brick." Like the burlesk comedian, I am abnormally fond of that precision which creates movement.

I would never use a long word, even, where a short one would answer the purpose. I know there are professors in this country who 'ligate' arteries. Other surgeons only tie them, and it stops the bleeding just as well.

Suppose atomic bombs had reduced the population of the world to one brother and one sister, should they let the human race die out? I do not know the answer, but I do not think it can be in the affirmative merely on the ground that incest is wicked.

But when I talk to people who are Darwinists or evolutionists and say, 'Well, how did life begin' -- they're...they don't have an answer. I mean, they have an answer, but it's a BS answer. It's an answer that wouldn't make sense to a small child.

Political scientists don't work at banks which is a problem. As political issues become more important for the markets, analysts at banks are asked all sorts of questions they don't have the ability to answer. And if you're getting paid to answer questions as analysts at banks are you never want to be in the position of saying you don't know.

"Why would anyone want to be President today?" The answer is not one of glory, or fame; today the burdens of the office outweigh its privileges. It's not because the Presidency offers a chance to be somebody, but because it offers a chance to do something.

Richard Nixon, television address on NBC and CBS (September 19, 1968), in Nixon Speaks Out, Major Speeches and Statements … in the Presidential Campaign of 1968 (1968), p. 1.

That no Man, of what Estate or Condition that he be, shall be put out of Land or Tenement, nor taken, nor imprisoned, nor disinherited, nor put to death, without being brought in answer by due-process of Law.

28 Edward III, Chapter 3, reported in Henry Booth Warrington, The Works of the Right Honourable Henry, Late Lord Delamer, and Earl of Warrington (1694), p. 102.

Fraud may consist as well in the suppression of what is true as in the representation of what is false. If a man professing to answer a question, select those facts only which are likely to give a credit to the person of whom he speaks, and keep back the rest, he is a more artful knave than he who tells a direct falsehood.